Almost Famous: Ivalua Acquires Directworks

Confirming the spend management industry rumor mill, Ivalua today announced its acquisition of Directworks. The deal lends serious credence to Ivalua’s tag line — “One Suite. Infinite Possibilities” — as it has the potential to establish Ivalua as the market’s only native, end-to-end S2P solution.

In terms of indirect spend know-how, Ivalua is a thought leader and its software is top drawer. On the direct side, Directworks goes deep, delivering Ivalua an arsenal of hard-won intellectual property based on battle-tested experience.

As modern user interface design goes, however, Directworks was out of its depth, probably the single biggest drag on an otherwise inspired approach to managing direct spend. While its ability to slice, dice and otherwise manage bills of materials (BoM) is distinguished, it generally lacked the portfolio management tools one would expect and wasn’t nearly as user configurable as it needed to be.

By comparison, Ivalua is a master of workflow and end-user configuration. The provider’s challenge, then, is to harness the raw horsepower Directworks brings and showcase it in a fashion that doesn’t subtract from the user experience it has so carefully crafted.

Simply put, the Ivalua-Directworks combination has the potential to raise the solution market bar. In terms of spend coverage (both indirect and direct), it truly has the opportunity to distance itself. Were Ivalua to add-in optimization capability to the mix — I know, I’m being greedy here — well, I wouldn’t have referenced the movie “Almost Famous” in this post’s title, as the possibilities would, in fact, become infinite.

Because there’s a lot at stake here, we plan to stay as close to Ivalua’s development and integration progress as they’ll let us. Meanwhile, congratulations are in order to both firms.

To learn more about both providers, including individual deep dive vendor summaries, see our previous coverage below: